E3 2009: Crytek Talks Crysis 2

Share.

No gameplay details yet, but company talks multiplatform development.

By Jason Ocampo

Crysis 2 is a reality. We know this because EA and Crytek announced the game during EA's big E3 press conference today. Unfortunately, that's about all they did. The companies aren't talking much about the game itself, even during a face-to-face interview that we had with Crytek boss Cevat Yerli and EA Partners head David DeMartini shortly before the press conference.

Right now, both companies are happy to stick with the announcement. According to both Yerli and DeMartini, the deal for EA to publish Crysis 2 for the PC, Xbox 360, and PlayStation 3 is an extension of their earlier deal for Crysis and Crysis Warhead. And, of course, there's the major bombshell that Crysis 2 is multiplatform and not a PC-exclusive title.

Yerli explained that the very competitiveness of Crytek was at stake. He said that while Crysis was successful from a critical and commercial point of view, but it's breaking even to making some profit. "Going forward we need to be more profitable, and the only way to do that is logically to move our company toward the consoles," Yerli said.

Crysis 2 is being built on the company's new CryEngine 3 technology, which it showcased at the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco earlier this year. Yerli explained that the CryEngine 3 was a significant breakthrough for the company. He said that it's capable of scaling performance considerably, so he maintains that the PC version of Crysis 2 will look far better than the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 versions. At the same time, the console games will be as state-of-the-art as possible for those platforms.

"We don't need to dumb down the game; the technology provides all the horsepower we need to make a kick-ass 360 game, a kick-ass PS3 game, and push the PC gaming forward still," Yerli said.

When asked if that sounded like a contradiction, he responded that you have to think of technology as a tool that can scale. He said the game's content scales to the platform it's on. "The PC version will look better, because of the fact that the PC can do more. It will be scaling up. But on the consoles, you're competing with console games," he said. "The goal is to be the best looking game on PS3 [and] the best looking game on 360 in the entire market." On the PC front, Crysis 2 will compete with the original Crysis, which still sets the bar for PC graphics.

We asked Yerli about Crysis Warhead, a game that Crytek said was sort of an experiment to see if it could stick with just the PC. "Warhead was a financial success, Warhead was a critical success, Warhead won numerous awards," Yerli said. DeMartini said that it got great reviews and "we were very happy with it." Yerli wouldn't rule out future PC-only games, but Crysis "is our flagship franchise" and they want it to get it to as many gamers as possible.

Any questions that we asked about the game, the gameplay, the setting, and anything else Crysis fans might want to know they basically declined to answer for now. Yerli did say that the game was being developed by the company's Frankfurt studio, but it sounds like its satellite studios spread across Europe may be contributing somehow. More details will come out later this year, quite probably at the big gamescom show in Cologne, Germany, this August. Crytek is, after all, a Germany company.